For example, I didn’t fall in love with Titanfall 2’s environmental art design—it felt a bit generic to me, like it was meant to be the backdrop for a shooter, as opposed to the Sevastopol in A:I or the station in SOMA that felt like existing locations.
Ditto BioShock: Infinite. The world felt like it was built around the premise of being an arena shooter, not the other way around.
BioShock 1 & 2 are exactly what I’m talking about though.
Even Borderlands 2 has great world-building: the corporate history that can be inferred from the level design, the weapons & the NPCs makes it one of the richer games I’ve played.
Would love to hear others’ thoughts on your favorite FPS environments!
Actually Doom 3 has something like that going for it at least at the first 2/3rds of the game. And is of a big submersive help all of the pdas that are realistic enough as to make you feel in an actual mars base with people working there. But also playing thtought it is honestly a miserable experience since darkness plays a big part on the game to the point that lots of places are pitch black, since it leans more into the horror aspects of doom, witch sound good on paper since hell invanding the mortal plane is a really scary situation to be in if you think about it, but the games goes about the horror aspect by giving demons some horrible and disturbing sound effects, specially the imps with some very high pitch screeching, and it really works for a while but it becomes more annoying as time goes on and just becomes mentally opresive and draining to play as it makes me feel so disturbed that i must stop playing it after a while and i even started having nightmares some times. But the gameplay is very solid, rather simple but solid, while you get enugh arsenal to destroy mars, the monsters drain your resources kinda faster thatn what you would think, and you kinda have to manage what weapon would you use aginst what monster and or situation, and constantly have to explore the facility in order to keep your amo pool and options full and accesible, now dont get me wrong, Doom 3 is an action game with horror elements, not a survuval horror, but the design choices are subtle enough to keep you on your toes. So i recomend since it fits in your requirements quite well, but be warned that its not for the faint of heart. I also recomend you system shock 2, havent played it but i heard it has good world building.